Bangert: In Alamo, one man's towering testament to hard feelings and payback

Oct. 9, 2012

The monument Joseph Willis had built in his memory cost $2,800 in 1903 and had to be shipped from New York City to the Alamo Cemetery in southern Montgomery County. / Instagram photo by Dave Bangert/Journal & Cour

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Other than its 37-foot height, the Joseph Willis obelisk is simple in its wording, sticking with his name and the days he was born and died.

Joseph Willis patented a cure-all he called the Pansy Compound, something he claimed could remedy a host of chronic diseases and 'female weakness.' In his will, Willis said he sold the patent to Eli Lilly. This advertising flier was produced in 1892, 11 years before Willis' death. / Photo courtesy Emergence of Advertising in America

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ALAMO — When you go, what do you hope to leave behind so people remember?

Joseph M. Willis, a patent medicine maker near the turn of the 20th century and a man a newspaper of his day concluded was “peculiar to the extreme,” had an idea about that.

If you’re heading the back way from Lafayette to Shades State Park, past where Indiana 25 ends and southern Montgomery County roads take over, it’s hard to miss what he had in mind.

In the Alamo Cemetery — 38 miles south of Lafayette, on Montgomery County Road 400 South, just east of this secluded, four-square-block town — the 37-foot monument Willis demanded in his will cuts a striking view. The obelisk on a Hoosier back road dwarfs all around it. On 60 tons of Barre granite shaped in New York, the only inscriptions are his name — “Willis” — on the west side, and his full name and dates of birth and death — “December 26, 1848 - November 11, 1903” — on the east.

Nothing more lets on about the stir Willis made in the curious newspaper stories about his life, his violent death and the final, odd demands meant to make a town remember his name.

“It’s old hat, I guess you could say,” said Don Bayless, who grew up in Alamo, graduated from the now defunct Alamo High School (class of ’56) and still lives a quarter-mile west of the WPA-era Alamo gym with the collapsing roof.

“But 95 percent in Alamo today don’t know who it is or why it was. ... Honestly, I can tell you we just took it for granted. But it still makes for a good story, I’ll bet.”

That’s true. This is a story about how a man who imagined greatness, even planned for it in his exit, and closed his life figuring he’d found a way to lord it over his neighbors, his family and a town he came to resent.

'Where
is Doc Willis?'

According to newspaper accounts in 1903, it took two days after he died in his room before someone in Alamo asked, “Where is ‘Doc’ Willis?”

(Page 2 of 5)

Willis grew up three miles north of Alamo. He moved to Crawfordsville and worked in the Lew Fisher Drug Store. The newspapers, collected by the Crawfordsville District Public Library, say it was in Crawfordsville that Willis and Fisher formulated a cure-all medicine sold as Pansy Compound.

It’s clear that Willis had high hopes for Pansy Compound, “a purely vegetable remedy” that boasted the healing powers for everything from constipation to sore throat, rheumatism to syphilis, “all blood poison” to “female diseases.”

In 1902, Willis moved to Alamo, where two of his sisters lived, and built a two-story building on what is now Walnut Street where he could live, as well as manufacture and market his wonder drug.

In a will he had drafted in August 1902, and which was detailed after his death in the Crawfordsville Journal, Willis referenced the eventual sale of the Pansy Compound formula, “which is now in the hands of Eli Lilly & Co. pharmacists, Indianapolis, Ind.”

Willis was an entrepreneur who made a name for himself in business. The Crawfordsville Journal reported that once he left Crawfordsville, 14 miles to the east, he rarely returned — “and then only for a few hours.” He also was “a man of many unusual traits,” and “his life as the recluse gave him a reputation as an oddity,” the newspaper wrote.

That wound up as the headline in the Crawfordsville Journal on Nov. 13, 1903, the day Willis’ body was found: “Suicide of a Recluse.”

After someone asked if anyone had seen Willis lately, the paper reported, someone mentioned, “Perhaps the shot we heard last Wednesday told of him.”

A group of men, one taking a ladder to look inside his second-floor room, found him with a gunshot wound to the forehead.

On his headboard Willis pinned a note, written in a mix of pencil and pen on sheets of foolscap paper that stretched 3 feet from his headboard to the floor. (Initial versions of the story say the note was 5 feet long.)

(Page 3 of 5)

Newspapers — including the Crawfordsville Journal, The Weekly News Review and the Waveland Independent — raced to print the contents of the note (“a marvel in its way,” the Journal wrote), the will and the controversy they caused in the days after his body was found.

(The story went head to head with accounts of the possibility of the Notre Dame-Wabash College game being moved from South Bend to Crawfordsville, and whether the game would actually be played. They did play at Wabash on Thanksgiving Day. Notre Dame won, 35-0.)

'A band of national reputation'

First, Willis requested that his body be taken to a crematory in St. Louis, with funeral director D.C. Barnhill of Crawfordsville accompanying his remains.

Next, he called for music. And not just any band.

“I want a first-class band of national reputation employed to be present here at Alamo and furnish music for the exercises pertaining to my funeral. ... I will suggest the employment of the Marine or Military band of Indianapolis, Ind., or the Ringgold band of Terre Haute, Ind., or any other first class band that will pick up and come on the spur of the moment.”

He wrote that he had enough — “on my person at this moment the sum of $372.50,” plus a registered government bond for $500 — to cover the costs of a top-notch band.

Then, the first dig.

“I would not want any Crawfordsville band employed for the occasion only as a last resort from the fact that they are never under good organization and their music is not entertaining,” Willis wrote in his farewell note.

The Crawfordsville Journal wrote on Nov. 16, 1903, that “all of Alamo and Ripley Township attend en masse.”

But the story ran under this headline: “Did Not Entertain: The funeral of Joseph M. Willis held Sunday, but there was no music.” A story the following day had this headline: “Where was the band?”

(Page 4 of 5)

The paper reported that fingers were pointing in all directions. “Undertaker Barnhill states that the (Crawfordsville) band boys did not care to play on account of the reference made to them in the ante-mortem statement. ... The management of the band say that nothing was said to them about playing, but they would have done it as it was the money not sentiment they were after.”

“But the fact remains that there was no band as provided for,” the Journal wrote.

'Monument
to my memory'

Finally, his note repeated what he’d drawn up in his will in 1902, calling for all of his assets, after all debts and funeral costs, to go to “the purchase and erection of a monument to my memory to be placed and erected in the cemetery at Alamo.”

This gets to the second dig, one meant to last forever.

While his will was dry and to the point, his final note expounded on his own makeup and that of the people around him.

“I cannot be a common loafer, and therefore did not suit the people,” the Crawfordsville Journal reported from his note. “In taking up abode in this lonely village among a class of people with little or no refinement, I depended mainly upon my relatives here as my associates and my company, but since they (my relatives) have turned against me I have nothing to cheer me up nor comfort me. Had my relatives treated me with respect I would have left them every dollar of my possessions.”

His sisters, Julia A. Lindsey and Mrs. Rhoden Ham, were no doubt offended. They wrote a letter published Nov. 20, 1903, in the Crawfordsville Journal, defending themselves and Alamo. “In sickness and distress you can find no community where they will fly to the relief of the suffering as quickly as here.”

Lindsey and Ham contested the will, asking for $2,500 from the estate, according to a history written in the Montgomery Magazine in June 1976.

They settled for $50 each.

And the Pansy Compound formula — something that doesn’t warrant a mention in today’s files of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin — wound up drawing $620, not the thousands Willis thought it might, according to the Montgomery Magazine account.

(Page 5 of 5)

A final tally of Willis’ estate was $2,759. A monument company in New York charged $2,600 to cut and ship the obelisk to Waynetown. It was taken the eight miles from Waynetown to Alamo by horse and wagon. What was left of Willis’ estate was given to the cemetery.

'Men often
make mistakes'

“That must be in the water in this town,” Jim Spence said after getting a short version of the story behind Willis’ monument. The Ripley Township trustee was picking up mail last week at the post office boxes in a small corner office at the Ripley Township Volunteer Fire Department.

“They are fiercely independent here, to the point of paranoia,” Spence said of Alamo, a town that shrunk from 137 in 2000 to 66 in 2010, according to the U.S. census. “Sounds like he would have fit in.”

Bayless, who grew up in the shadow of the monument and spent time as a Ripley Township board member, said groups used to come out from Crawfordsville to see the cemetery, particularly to check out Willis’ monument.

When Willis’ body was found in 1903, the coroner came across a prospectus of what the Crawfordsville Journal referred to as one of Willis’ get-rich schemes. On it, Willis had written: “Men often make mistakes, but who has made a greater mistake than I?”

It was a statement of great speculation in the curious newspaper coverage of the day. “The sentiment again like the man is an enigma, and who may know the meaning,” the Crawfordsville Journal wrote on Nov. 14, 1903. “Is it possible that the man has been losing money in one of the glittering fancies the booklet described, or is it the knowledge of his lonely and morose life?”

Or did he just misjudge how well a 37-foot obelisk would stand testament to his memory? Then again, here we are, talking about it again, 109 years later.